Download the RC for Windows Embedded Standard 7!

Your first question may be “What is Windows Embedded Standard 7?” Well, based on feedback from many of our partners and customers, the alignment between our embedded product and Windows 7 was not clear. It makes sense for our business to take advantage of the great reception Windows 7 has received and, therefore, we will be changing our versioning system from release year-based versions to numeric versions based on the underlying OS for that embedded release. Therefore, Windows Embedded Standard 2011 will now be known as Windows Embedded Standard 7.

Your second question is probably “RC? What’s that and where do I get it?” RC is the abbreviation we in the engineering group use to talk about our Release Candidate build. This is our last pre-release build before we package up the product and make it final! We’ve been working hard on this and are excited to give you access to what we think will be close to our final version of Standard 7. You can download it from Microsoft Connect here: https://connect.microsoft.com/windowsembedded.

Thanks to the thousands of partners and customers we’ve had download our previous CTP versions and provide feedback, we’ve incorporated a lot of changes into this release. Before you install the RC release make sure that you uninstall any previous versions of the CTP that you may have on your computer. Also check out the Documentation download and read through the Release Notes. You will notice that after you install the product you’ll still see a lot of references to “Windows Embedded Standard 2011” and we are currently working on getting those all changed over to the new naming structure.

Continue submitting your feedback through the Feedback forms on Connect and through our MSDN forum as well. We can’t wait to hear what you think of the RC release!